Maybe the zombie works here? Oh, you already killed it.

Dael’s Adventure Part 5

With the location of our new headquarters picked out, Cilla began setting it up while Team Intern went to investigate the Temple of Pharasma. I really should have paid more attention during religious studies, though to be fair the Order never really put too much effort into explaining the gods, but Master Thevarada always said worship was a personal affair, that it was tangential to the pursuit of appreciation. Regardless, if I had spent a bit more time I might have realized that since Pharasma is the goddess of death, it would be the obvious place to look for information about a corpse! Plus apparently the Necromancer Sammael was friends with the Medical Examiner who worked there. Boy, a city sure is complicated. Though I have read several logs of initiates who went to Hornshroud, it all seemed to make much more sense; I wonder how much of this weirdness is due to the whole waking dream situation? I kind of feel like not so much since none of the others seem particularly bothered by any of this.

The Temple, once we arrived and went inside seems awfully decrepit but we perservered, splitting into two groups this time, with Solei, Hubert and I heading to the administrative rooms to look for records, whilst the others headed down to the morgue in case the Medical Examiner was there. Spoilers, she totally was, and I heard later from Honch that she had a weird zone of music that was so loud it was physically painful, but was limited in area. I really wish I’d gone with that group as that sounds amazingly unusual, and much more interesting than looking through records, a thing I was basically no help with. My boredom did end up working out for us as I spotted the first zombie well before it got to us. I closed the door whilst we discussed what to do, then I opened the door and again and Solei made short work of the foul creature slicing off it’s arm and head almost before Hubert could even ask what was going on.

Shortly after the rest of the group returned with the Medical examiner, I think her name was Abbae; She looked weird: pale and washed out as if seen at dusk, yet that may have just been an illusion caused by the fact that everything else around her was not just thrown in stark relief, but appeared more real, and also more clean and upkept, almost as if she was providing window into the waking world. She seemed to have a better grasp of the filing system and agreed to help us look, which is when I again noticed more zombies. It was a good thing we’d regrouped, as there were a lot more of them, and I’ll admit this was one of my least favorite brawls I’ve ever been in. Half the time when I punched or kicked one of them, rather than sending them sprawling my fist or foot would end up going into them and come out covered in rotting bits.

We had almost finished off the putrescent corpses when there was a great crash and a huge skeleton, that looked like it was an agglomeration of man and bison smashed through the wall into the main admin chamber. It was then that I had what might have been a tremendously foolhardy idea, but I went over to try and get a closer look, as I’d never seen anything like it before. It was far too big to fit through the door so I might have taunted it a bit, as at that time I hadn’t realized it had already smashed through one wall. When it rushed forwards to try and gore me I dodged to the side, thinking it would smack the wall and the rest of the interns would come to my aide, but things didn’t play out that way at all… for starters several of the zombies had some sort of paralytic effect, stunning both Honch and Vyrez making it so they could barely walk meanwhile the Skeletal Minotaur’s charge missed me but destroyed the wall. Vyrez called out some sort of challenge to the beast, which it seemed inclined to accept, except that it couldn’t figure out how to get around me. At this point it occurred to me to try the Fist of Cracking Boulders technique which is well known to break ribs in normal people so I rarely have used it outside of practice, but this thing was basically all ribs! And low it was effective, every punch I threw cracked and shattered ribs, and emboldened by efforts Vyrez and Honch joined battle drawing it’s attention off of me. There was also some mystical light of some kind which I assumed was manifested at the behest of Mortia, as I’d seen her create a similar attack against the Ebonbiter thugs.

Anyways, we were able to defeat the undead hordes, and it wasn’t too long afterwards that Abbae found the information we needed. Or rather, that what we sought was basically unattainable as Sammael had pretty much split the corpse up into pieces and sold them to a variety of customers across the land. After a bit of discussion, and some more investigation by the more bureaucratically inclined a new plan was hatched, go to the tenements district (where there might be a living night hag) and (this is the part I’m not super clear on, I was kind of busy cleaning the gore off of myself) either killing it and presenting it to the diviners, or convincing it to help us break the spell on the city and have us all wake up.

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